I am a forward-thinking technical leader, specialising in strategy, organisational transformation and building high-performing teams. I bridge technical and commercial goals to deliver outstanding business outcomes across cloud-native and web platforms. With extensive experience in financial services and consultancy, I drive change through pragmatic leadership and a passion for continuous improvement.

I am passionate about high-quality software development, promoting DevOps culture ("you build it, you run it"), and fostering environments that enable teams to thrive. As an active speaker, blogger and industry contributor, I believe in continuous learning and sharing knowledge.

Core Skills

  • Technical strategy, direction-setting and stakeholder engagement
  • Specialist in modern web development, particularly NodeJS and React
  • Cloud-native development, particularly AWS
  • CI/CD, DevOps and Platform Engineering
  • Cross-functional team leadership and mentoring
  • Public speaking, blogging and community engagement

Employment History

Tesco Bank (2021 -> Present)

Principal Engineer, Platform Engineering

  • Engineering management and technical ownership of the Bank’s AWS, Containers and Azure Platforms.
  • Facilitated a green audit of the Bank’s Cloud platform estate from an operating controls perspective.
  • Rollout of modern identity access to the Bank’s AWS Platform using AWS IAM Identity Center.
  • Established a FinOps function within platform engineering, on track to save £2m per annum on our AWS Bill.
  • Stakeholder and supplier management of our AWS and Microsoft accounts.
  • Rationalisation of the Bank’s network traffic flows to a single proxy service.
  • (Ongoing) Migration from bespoke Platform Engineering tooling to native AWS provisioning and management capabilities (AWS Control Tower) to operate the Bank’s AWS Platform at scale.

Engineering Lead, Insurance

  • Successfully delivered the Bank's first new insurance product in over a decade.
  • Modernising the home and motor insurance applications to the Bank's bespoke Node/React framework
  • Implementing continuous delivery through automated Jenkins pipelines
  • Reducing cloud running costs and operational overhead
  • Engaging with technical and commercial stakeholders, in addition to external vendors.
  • Line management and mentoring of technical colleagues
  • Establish the value stream through a transformation to SAFe.

Senior Engineer, Savings

  • Developing an MVP rollout for a replacement loans application journey. Implemented with a bespoke Node/React framework.

Test-Driven Solutions (2021)

  • Line management and engineering leadership for colleagues in the UK, Europe and Canada.
  • Developed hiring practices, technical strategy and led product development initiatives.
  • Provided strategic consultation and technical proposals to public and private sector clients.
  • Contributed to achieving ISO 27001 accreditation.

Tesco Bank (2020 -> 2021)

  • Java and React development for the Bank's longstanding Spring Boot home and motor insurance applications. Implementing regulatory changes for fair pricing and 3DS2 payments. Coaching junior engineering staff to become productive team members.

Scott Logic (2015 -> 2020)

Lead Developer

  • I led a team of 13 to produce a cloud-native financial product on GCP. My responsibilities focused on establishing a CI/CD pipeline (Gitlab running on Kubernetes), using Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, designing the microservices architecture and utilising consumer-driven contract testing (Pact) in the test strategy for safe deployments.
  • I led a team for a high-profile client, developing an initial prototype project built with Node/React and Java Sprint Boot. I established TDD practices and worked with the business to bring the product to market. Subsequently, the team expanded to 15 and I moved to a leadership role. I line-managed the development and testing team, focusing on growing the product and transitioning from in-house operations to Google Kubernetes Engine.

Senior Developer

  • Development of a high-performance Node/React web application for a large UK bank's FX trading desk. I was the SME for front-end development.
  • On-site consultancy for a Danish financial firm, evaluating the architecture, performance and operational infrastructure of their central web platform. I modernised their application architecture and established DevOps practices, including virtualisation with Vagrant and Puppet.

Nonlinear Dynamics (2014)

  • C# .NET development for biomedical research> This product involved rapidly-processing high quantities of data from mass spectrometry machines, to then perform statistical analysis and display results using interactive visualisations.

Scott Logic (2010 -> 2014)

  • Development of a C# desktop trading application, designing and implementing a unified technical architecture for all financial instruments transactable on the platform.

Education

2007 -> 2010: University of Newcastle Upon Tyne

  • BSc Computing Science with Games and Virtual Environments - 1st Class (Hons)

Legal Status

I am a British citizen.

References

Available on request.